YouTube Transcript Scraper

Extract transcripts, subtitles, and metadata from YouTube videos. No browser needed — pure HTTP, fast and affordable.

What does YouTube Transcript Scraper do?

YouTube Transcript Scraper extracts publicly available transcripts and metadata from YouTube videos, at a fraction of the cost of alternatives.

• Extract full transcripts with or without timestamps from any YouTube video
• Get video metadata: title, description, views, likes, publish date, channel, keywords
• Support 100+ languages — both manual captions and auto-generated subtitles
• Process multiple videos in a single run via batch URL input
• Get full plain text output ready for AI, LLM, and RAG pipelines
• No browser, no Playwright, no Puppeteer — pure HTTP, minimal compute cost

How to use YouTube transcript data

You can use this scraper to:

• Feed AI and LLMs: Use transcripts as context for ChatGPT, Claude, or your own models
• Content research: Analyze what competitors or influencers are saying at scale
• SEO research: Extract keywords, topics, and talking points from top-ranking videos
• Build knowledge bases: Create searchable text databases from video content
• Summarization pipelines: Auto-summarize YouTube videos without watching them
• Accessibility: Generate text versions of video content for hearing-impaired users
• Training data: Collect large-scale multilingual text for model training

What data can you extract?

Field	Description
📝 Full transcript	Complete text of all spoken content
⏱ Timestamped segments	Text broken into segments with start time and duration
🎬 Video title	Title of the video
📄 Description	Full video description
👁 View count	Total number of views
👍 Like count	Number of likes
📅 Publish date	When the video was published
📺 Channel name	Name of the YouTube channel
🔑 Keywords	Tags associated with the video
🌐 Available languages	All available transcript languages
🖼 Thumbnail	URL of the video thumbnail

How to scrape YouTube transcripts

Get started in minutes:

1. Create a free Apify account
2. Open YouTube Transcript Scraper
3. Paste one or more YouTube video URLs
4. Click Start and wait for the results
5. Download your data in JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML

⬇️ Input example

{
    "urls": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
        "https://youtu.be/9bZkp7q19f0"
    ],
    "language": "en",
    "includeAutoGenerated": true,
    "includeTimestamps": true,
    "outputFullText": true
}

Supported URL formats:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID
• Direct video ID: VIDEO_ID

⬆️ Output example

{
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)",
    "channelName": "Rick Astley",
    "viewCount": 1752068825,
    "likeCount": 16000000,
    "publishDate": "2009-10-25",
    "selectedLanguage": "en",
    "isAutoGenerated": true,
    "segments": [
        {
            "text": "We're no strangers to love",
            "start": 18.0,
            "startFormatted": "0:18",
            "duration": 3.28
        }
    ],
    "fullText": "We're no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I..."
}

❓ FAQ

Does it work with auto-generated subtitles?

Yes. YouTube automatically generates subtitles for most videos. This scraper supports both manually uploaded captions and auto-generated ones. You can control this via the includeAutoGenerated parameter.

What languages are supported?

Any language that YouTube provides captions for. Set your preferred language using the language parameter (e.g. en, zh-Hans, ja, ko, es, fr). If the preferred language is unavailable, the scraper falls back to the next best match.

What if a video has no transcript?

The result will include all available metadata but segments and fullText will be null, and an error field will indicate "No transcript available".

How much does it cost?

This scraper uses pure HTTP — no browser, no Playwright. It consumes minimal compute units. At $5.00 per 1,000 videos, it is among the most affordable YouTube transcript tools on Apify.

Is it faster than alternatives?

Yes. Because we don't launch a browser, typical runs complete in 2–5 seconds for a single video, compared to 15–30 seconds for browser-based scrapers.